Boy scout, 15, accidentally makes mom's shed radioactive after building homemade nuclear reactor

For all the films and TV shows that show the horrendous after-effects of nuclear accidents, you'd probably be surprised to learn that anyone has ever tried to build a nuclear reactor of their own with homebrew materials.

Well, that's just what one boy scout, David Charles Hahn, did, while others in his troop were busy concentrating on campsite skills, knot-tying or bird-spotting.

He was apparently fascinated by nuclear energy, and at the age of 15 he started to collect together the household kitchen equipment and materials that he would need, in his mom's shed in Michigan.

Jim West / Alamy Stock Photo

By August 1994 Hahn was apparently quite far down the line in building what's called a breeder reactor, albeit a homemade one, but things apparently unravelled when neighbours saw him loading materials into the back of his car.

Concerned about what they saw, and initially thinking he was stealing car tyres, they called the police, who were unsurprisingly surprised by what they instead found - the rudimentary makings of a homemade nuclear reactor.

Hahn was arrested, and the authorities had to scramble a little to work out what to do with the radioactive material in question. It was eventually disposed of, along with all the reactor parts, in a waste site out in the desert where it couldn't do anyone any harm.

Interestingly, Hahn didn't get punished too heavily at all - he was simply barred from returning to the site of his project until everything had been cleaned away, and didn't go to prison or serve any time, possibly due to his seemingly innocent intentions.

However, there were still lingering concerns in the neighborhood about the possibility that ambient radiation had been left behind by the reactor, which could be dangerous.

Anyone who's seen a show like Chernobyl or knows much about that famous reactor meltdown will know that this sort of atmospheric radiation can be hugely dangerous in major concentrations, even if that was never going to be the scale of things in Hahn's case.

So, according to Harper's Magazine in 1998, they organized a major cleanup in tandem with the EPA to scrub any traces of it away, at a cost of some $60,000.

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The story has gained attention over the years, written up as a book called 'The Radioactive Boy Scout', but the rest of Hahn's life is a sadder tale.

In 2007 he pleaded guilty in a case alleging he'd tried to steal 16 smoke detectors, with the police noting at the time that it "was a possible effort to experiment with radioactive materials".

Then, in 2016, he died of an apparent overdose after struggling with mental health and addiction, marking a tragic end.

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